4 Programming Animated Statistical Graphics with R

Author

SU, Bo-Han

4.1 Overview

When telling a visually-driven data story, animated graphics tends to attract the interest of the audience and make deeper impression than static graphics. In this hands-on exercise, you will learn how to create animated data visualisation by using gganimate and plotly r packages. At the same time, you will also learn how to (i) reshape data by using tidyr package, and (ii) process, wrangle and transform data by using dplyr package.

4.2 Getting Started

4.2.1 Loading the R packages

First, write a code chunk to check, install and load the following R packages:

plotly, R library for plotting interactive statistical graphs.
gganimate, an ggplot extension for creating animated statistical graphs.
gifski converts video frames to GIF animations using pngquant’s fancy features for efficient cross-frame palettes and temporal dithering. It produces animated GIFs that use thousands of colors per frame.
gapminder: An excerpt of the data available at Gapminder.org. We just want to use its country_colors scheme.
tidyverse, a family of modern R packages specially designed to support data science, analysis and communication task including creating static statistical graphs.

pacman::p_load(readxl, gifski, gapminder,
               plotly, gganimate, tidyverse)

4.2.2 Importing the data

col <- c("Country", "Continent")
globalPop <- read_xls("data/GlobalPopulation.xls",
                      sheet="Data") %>%
  mutate_each_(funs(factor(.)), col) %>%
  mutate(Year = as.integer(Year))

Warning: `mutate_each_()` was deprecated in dplyr 0.7.0.
ℹ Please use `across()` instead.

Warning: `funs()` was deprecated in dplyr 0.8.0.
ℹ Please use a list of either functions or lambdas:

# Simple named list: list(mean = mean, median = median)

# Auto named with `tibble::lst()`: tibble::lst(mean, median)

# Using lambdas list(~ mean(., trim = .2), ~ median(., na.rm = TRUE))

Unfortunately, mutate_each_() was deprecated in dplyr 0.7.0. and funs() was deprecated in dplyr 0.8.0. In view of this, we will re-write the code by using mutate_at() as shown in the code chunk below.

col <- c("Country", "Continent")
globalPop <- read_xls("data/GlobalPopulation.xls",
                      sheet="Data") %>%
  mutate_at(col, as.factor) %>%
  mutate(Year = as.integer(Year))

Instead of using mutate_at(), across() can be used to derive the same outputs.

col <- c("Country", "Continent")
globalPop <- read_xls("data/GlobalPopulation.xls",
                      sheet="Data") %>%
  mutate(across(col, as.factor)) %>%
  mutate(Year = as.integer(Year))

Warning: There was 1 warning in `mutate()`.
ℹ In argument: `across(col, as.factor)`.
Caused by warning:
! Using an external vector in selections was deprecated in tidyselect 1.1.0.
ℹ Please use `all_of()` or `any_of()` instead.
  # Was:
  data %>% select(col)

  # Now:
  data %>% select(all_of(col))

See <https://tidyselect.r-lib.org/reference/faq-external-vector.html>.

4.3 Animated Data Visualisation: gganimate methods

gganimate extends the grammar of graphics as implemented by ggplot2 to include the description of animation. It does this by providing a range of new grammar classes that can be added to the plot object in order to customise how it should change with time.

transition_*() defines how the data should be spread out and how it relates to itself across time.
view_*() defines how the positional scales should change along the animation.
shadow_*() defines how data from other points in time should be presented in the given point in time.
enter_*()/exit_*() defines how new data should appear and how old data should disappear during the course of the animation.
ease_aes() defines how different aesthetics should be eased during transitions.

4.3.1 Building a static population bubble plot

ggplot(globalPop, aes(x = Old, y = Young, 
                      size = Population, 
                      colour = Country)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.7, 
             show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  labs(title = 'Year: {frame_time}', 
       x = '% Aged', 
       y = '% Young')

4.3.2 Building the animated bubble plot

In the code chunk below,

transition_time() of gganimate is used to create transition through distinct states in time (i.e. Year).
ease_aes() is used to control easing of aesthetics. The default is linear. Other methods are: quadratic, cubic, quartic, quintic, sine, circular, exponential, elastic, back, and bounce.

ggplot(globalPop, aes(x = Old, y = Young, 
                      size = Population, 
                      colour = Country)) +
  geom_point(alpha = 0.7, 
             show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  labs(title = 'Year: {frame_time}', 
       x = '% Aged', 
       y = '% Young') +
  transition_time(Year) +       
  ease_aes('linear')

4.4 Animated Data Visualisation: plotly

In Plotly R package, both ggplotly() and plot_ly() support key frame animations through the frame argument/aesthetic. They also support an idsargument/aesthetic to ensure smooth transitions between objects with the same id (which helps facilitate object constancy).

4.4.1 Building an animated bubble plot: `ggplotly()`method

gg <- ggplot(globalPop, 
       aes(x = Old, 
           y = Young, 
           size = Population, 
           colour = Country)) +
  geom_point(aes(size = Population,
                 frame = Year),
             alpha = 0.7, 
             show.legend = FALSE) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  labs(x = '% Aged', 
       y = '% Young')

Warning in geom_point(aes(size = Population, frame = Year), alpha = 0.7, :
Ignoring unknown aesthetics: frame

ggplotly(gg)

Warning in p$x$data[firstFrame] <- p$x$frames[[1]]$data: number of items to
replace is not a multiple of replacement length

Notice that although show.legend = FALSE argument was used, the legend still appears on the plot. To overcome this problem, theme(legend.position='none') should be used as shown in the plot and code chunk below.

gg <- ggplot(globalPop, 
       aes(x = Old, 
           y = Young, 
           size = Population, 
           colour = Country)) +
  geom_point(aes(size = Population,
                 frame = Year),
             alpha = 0.7) +
  scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
  scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
  labs(x = '% Aged', 
       y = '% Young') + 
  theme(legend.position='none')

Warning in geom_point(aes(size = Population, frame = Year), alpha = 0.7):
Ignoring unknown aesthetics: frame

ggplotly(gg)

Warning in p$x$data[firstFrame] <- p$x$frames[[1]]$data: number of items to
replace is not a multiple of replacement length

4.4.2 Building an animated bubble plot: `plot_ly()`method

bp <- globalPop %>%
  plot_ly(x = ~Old, 
          y = ~Young, 
          size = ~Population, 
          color = ~Continent,
          sizes = c(2, 100),
          frame = ~Year, 
          text = ~Country, 
          hoverinfo = "text",
          type = 'scatter',
          mode = 'markers'
          ) %>%
  layout(showlegend = FALSE)
bp

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